Friday, June 3, 2016

Far north with Nomad Ocean Adventure - Diving currents in Strait of Hormuz

My logged dives #1449-1451

Friday, June 3, 2016For some reason, a lot of people have wanted to learn how to dive lately and Bobbi and I have been having a great time showing them how or upgrading their credentials from Open Water to Advanced. It seems like every weekend in May we had another group wanting to take dive courses, and it was great fun, but Bobbi and I needed a break. We were planning one the weekend of June 3-4 when we caught wind of a far north trip to Fanaku, and possibly Kachelu, the current-ridden gem rising above the waters at the edge of the Straits of Hormuz. The trip was with Nomad Ocean Adventure, and Chris Chellapermal himself would lead the dives. Brian was the only one other booked on the trip when we added our names, so we put a note out on our Froglegs Facebook group. Jean Michel "Dro" Madery answered the call and booked, plus his friend Jean Marc. Cecil drew the lucky card from the Nomad staff to join the boatload, and by 8:15 we were headed out the harbor and on our way on the scenic trip past the entire mountainous coastline of Musandam all the way through the archipelago of islands off Kassab, all the way to the Strait of Hormuz to the island of Fanaku, beyond which there were no other islands to be seen further north.

Click here for more on the incident referred to by KevinOur first dive was on Fanaku, north to south on the west face. We'd been there before. It drops over a coral lip to a deep wall, down to sand where Chris likes to lead. Bobbi and I hung at an intermediate depth because we saw a leopard shark once in the more shallow coral beds there.

From there we moved to Kachelu to check it out, but the current seemed like madness both ends of the island, so we had lunch in Sphinx bay on Musandam Island, named after a rock Chris orients on, and dived from there into what turned out to be an air crunching current dive - for me, at any rate. I signaled Chris I was at 50 when I was actually at more like 30 (ok, 500 psi). Bobbi still had 100 (bar).

Time to head home with a stop at Temple Rock, in the vicinity of Mother of Mouse to east, which for me was the best dive of the day. We started with a ray right after descent and ended with a moray that entertained everyone with rippling gyrations. The videos tell the story.

Here's Dro Madery's take on my filming the honeycomb moray in the video above